And there you have it, all that you need to do is install (or update) our backup plugin Snapshot and every site you manage via WPMU DEV will come with managed backups.

What’s that I hear? You wanna check out some of the features? Well, sure thing!

Scheduled and One-Off Backups

The managed backups dashboard.

By default, when you set up Snapshot you’ll run an initial backup and also set up a backup schedule.

So as soon as you’re up and running we’ll backup your site, by default, on a weekly basis, storing the latest three backups, which you can easily configure up or down.

Then we’ll recycle the oldest with a new one. How easy is that!

10GB Storage to Use on Unlimited Sites… For Free!

Yep, that’s a nice healthy 10GB of storage space there for you, absolutely on the house.

And there’s absolutely no limit (as with all of WPMU DEV) on the number of sites you can use it with.

We’re starting with 10GB ‘cos it seems like a nice, reasonable amount, but there will definitely be options for more in the future and you can easily manage it by setting your number of stored managed backups to less than three.

Snapshot is standing by, ready to backup your WordPress site.

And Store to FTP, S3, Dropbox, Google Drive…

And if you do run low on data, you can always take advantage of Snapshot’s native third party integrations, which are as easy to set up as clicking Add New.

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104 Responses

VERY generous to include such a service in WPMUDEV’s membership !!!
i have always loved the idea of consolidating plugins, services etc. by a trusted professional company and WPMUDEV is as close as it gets to that ;
security, plugins, themes, advice, support, community, education, performance, and now backups.
cant go wrong.
keep up the GREAT work WPMUDEV !!!
CONGRATS on this milestone !!!

Interesting. Will be checking it out. Will updating all plugins and themes (outside of WPMUDEV plugins and themes) be coming soon as well along with verifying/updates current WP core versions on sites?

I think he’s referring to what James said in the article:
“So first up we’ve got a spanking new version of Snapshot itself coming out soon, which will make things a lot more beautiful and easy to use (as well as adding in some cool new things).”

The way this is worded suggests there’s a more substantial update coming soon.

Again WPMUDEV proves how much they value their members! Thank you for the generous 10 GB of free storage and what appears to be, a very elegant managed backup solution. I look forward to seeing what kind of pricing you will offer for more storage space in the future.

Hello Benard, as James mentioned, in the feature, there will be options for more! For now, if you run out of cloud space, you can use Snapshot’s additional options, like Google Drive, Amazon S3 and Dropbox.

Question on its use with a Multisite setup: Can it only be used by Super Admin on the network as a whole, or is there a way individual admins would be able to use it for their individual sites, somehow? I can’t see how, but it doesn’t hurt to ask anyway.. :)

At this moment in time, it is only super-admins that can use the plugin on multisite. However, with the managed backups,this does actually take a snapshot of the whole network itself (subject to limitations with your server config & hosting).

No, there’s no percentage & the amount of steps will vary depending on the amount of files & the amount of tables in the DB, so there’s no real way of guessing the amount of steps i’m afraid, adding a proper progress bar to this would mean a lot more server resources consumed and more processing time, those are better put to use on actually doing the backup process itself :)

Great to see benefits like this but 10GB is pointless in my case as my two biggest sites are 52gb and 16gb respectively. I back up daily to a second drive but it’s on the same server so I worry 24 hrs a day about a catastrophic failure. I tried unsuccessfully to get Snapshot working with OneDrive but am able to achieve that with Akeeba. Has anyone succeeded with a Snapshot > OneDrive connection?

WPMUDev is more and more becoming a one stop shop. I love you guys, for real!!
What we still need is WooCommerce support for Upfront. C’mon, we want to build shops! :D
We’re looking forward to the paid storage expansion :) Also I guess there would be an option to backup to your cloud, then send the files to Google Drive and delete them from the WPMUDev cloud, right?

Hey, Tom :) I was referring to your own cloud storage :D I meant this process :
1. Make a backup to WPMUDEV Cloud
2. Send it to Dropbox or Google Drive
3. Delete the WPMUDEV backup
4. Keep the backup in G’Drive
5. Be happy
I guess this cloud backup is meant to off-load the hosting resources, isn’t it?

Currently the backups are stored on amazon cloud servers in encrypted form in USA, so even if the cloud server was hacked, the data/backup is all encrypted. We may at 1 point in the future also add EU storage servers, but this is still in the planning phase currently.

Hmm thanks, that raise a concern at least for us, as we do not which to have our data and customers data potentially analyzed by the US government. Not that we have anything to hide, but we like be able to promise our customers that their data are stored safely way and being able to guarantee that their data integrity and privacy is 100% which is not the case when the data is stored in the USA and by a USA company. (Well referring to the linked thread above). This is a really serious issue today and way to many people are tired of being tracked in just about anything.

There’s no actual export feature, but all the backup zips can be downloaded by clicking the filename in your snapshot > manage backups page or by clicking the filename from the backups tab in the Hub page. So you can download each back up file to your computer if you wish.

This is pretty much the first step before creating a backup, all you need to do is add secret key that you can get by clicking on the link here after which you can activate “Managed Backups”, please see screenshot http://screencast.com/t/gAzMU7IH.

It’s amazing to see a company that keep improving things in a way we can focus more on our clients and less on daily tasks and tech stuff. Great plugins, great support, looking forward to see what’s next.

Hi Gurus,
this is amazing! One question. I have a live website and a development website.http://www.live.com
dev.live.com
I’m trying to figure out the best way to make updates on the dev site and then push them to the live site without having to delete the live site. will your new backup/restore service help me with this? is there a better way to make changes to a live site while still doing the development on a development site?
I’ve tried using Duplicator, but I have to delete everything on the ‘live” site before I can run that installer. I really want a workflow where it updates the live site smartly…
any suggestions is greatly appreciated.

Hello, Emilio! With Managed Backups you can restore and migrate your site.

You will need to download the snapshot-installer.php script and the full backup file, upload those files to your WordPress root directory. Open the snapshot-installer.php in your browser and follow the step by step instructions there.

The “Managed Backups” tool backs the data to our cloud storage servers but yes – you can user “regular snapshots” (see “Snapshot -> Snapshots” menu) and this will let you store backups in various locations, including Dropbox. You can of course use these backups to fully restore your site though the procedure would be a bit different: you would need to make sure that all the files and database tables are included in the snapshot first and then in order to restore you would need to setup a vanilla WordPress (basic – default – WP install), setup Snapshot plugin there, import the backup file and then proceed with restore.

What happens when you can’t start with a vanilla install? If I’m working on a live site, I can create a vanilla development site to duplicate the live server, but when I want to migrate the updates from the development server to the live server, I don’t want to delete all files and drop tables, I want a smart update that only adds/modifies/deletes what is needed on the live site.

You are not required to start with vanilla install. I mentioned this only in relation to the “full restore” (from scratch, e.g. in case “everything broke” or you switched host etc). You can use regular snapshots on an existing site (please note: Snapshot was not designed with site migration in mind, though it works well in most cases) and the plugin will take care of proper update.

Managed Backups however are purely for backup/restore purpose and not for site migration. The tool will also take care of files and tables “smartly” so you don’t need to setup a new WP to restore it from backup.

Can you point me to the readme that details how to migrate from one site to another? With UpdraftPlus or Duplicator there is clearly a migration feature, but I don’t see that with Snapshot.

I want a solution where I can migrate a live site to a development site, work on the development site, and then push the changes to the live site. Is that possible with Snapshot? Please explain how this is achieved.
Thanks kindly.

“I want a solution where I can migrate a live site to a development site, work on the development site, and then push the changes to the live site. Is that possible with Snapshot? Please explain how this is achieved.”

Snapshot Pro was not designed for such use and will not work that way. It’s a backup solution and not a “development environment”/deployment tool.

I’d just like to follow-up on my previous comment because I feel like I should give you a bit more detailed answer.

Previously I suggested that Snapshot can be used to migrate the site and it requires a new WP to be setup for a “target site”. This is true for example if you developed the site locally and want to move/copy it to a server to go live. However, Snapshot will of course work with existing setups as well.

You asked for “smart update” to migrate live site to a development environment and then be able to push changes back to live site. With Snapshot this can be done this way:

– for migration first create a full snapshot (including all files and database tables) of a live site and import it either to a vanilla development install

– then make your changes and create new snapshot on development site; each snapshot can be configured to include “everything” or just e.g. plugins and only selected tables of the database;

So, to push changes that you made to, for example, child-theme you only need to include themes in that snapshot; if you worked on a plugin, include plugins and relevant tables etc.

– then import that snapshot to your live site.

I hope that helps a bit :) If you have any more questions on this or need assistance, let me know on our Support Forum please and I’m sure I’ll be able to find a solution for you.

Just tried a restore with the script, worked well but with some tweaks, had to re-import demo content from the theme this a new site, wpml got screw the fonts the latin fonts are not present, anyway not perfect migration.

So far the best migration software i have use is this one https://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-wp-migration/ free version limits you to 512 MB if your site is to big you can upload the “uploads” folder and just migrate the database. All its ask is to re-save to times the permanent links after migration.

At this moment in time the managed backups can only backup the whole multisite, there’s no functionality to be able to backup individual subsites only. But this has been suggested and I believe this might be a possibility for the future.